Court hearing on the foxes: Press release
On Thursday 23 July 2026 at 10am, the Administrative Court of Cergy-Pontoise will hear the application for summary proceedings brought by One Voice against the order issued by the Prefect of Hauts-de-Seine on 15 June 2026. This order authorises, for two and a half months, hunts at the authorities’ initiative in a private garden, using traps or night-time shooting. This is an exceptional measure misused for purposes other than its intended aim, with no legal or scientific basis, which the organisation is calling for to be suspended as a matter of urgency.
One needs to understand what lies behind the administrative terminology. From 15 June to 31 August, in the dead of night, foxes may be hunted down, trapped or shot in a private garden in the Hauts-de-Seine. Night-time shooting and traps, whose unspeakable cruelty is well-known: they strike indiscriminately, without distinguishing their victims. These are the methods being deployed – hard to believe, almost impossible to imagine. And for what danger? Droppings and burrows in a garden.
A woman complained about the presence of foxes and therefore requested that traps be set up in her garden to wipe out this fox family. The prefecture authorised their killing, upon simple request, without considering any alternative measures or making the slightest effort to raise awareness. The easy way out: killing, rather than learning to coexist.
Nature’s treasures, treated as pests
Who are these so-called ‘pests’? Highly intelligent creatures with exceptional abilities to adapt, remember and learn, endowed with a particularly sophisticated social organisation and means of communication. Playful and sociable, foxes are also excellent parents. All they ask is to live in peace, to look after and feed their family – in the height of summer, when the year’s litter of cubs are still dependent on their parents. As emblems of our forests and countryside, they are now also settling on the outskirts of our towns and cities. Coming across a fox in your garden is not a nuisance, it is a stroke of luck.
A fox shuns humans and is completely harmless. In its 2023 report, the French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health & Safety (ANSES) concluded that no culling of foxes could be justified on health grounds. Worse still: culling them has the opposite effect, by encouraging the proliferation of rodents that carry Lyme disease. Foxes are not a threat; they are our allies.
A nationwide campaign against foxes
This order is part of a wider campaign of persecution: every year in France, at least 500,000 foxes are killed by shooting, trapping or digging-out, largely because they are classified as a ‘species likely to cause damage’ (ESOD) in 88 departments, a classification with no scientific basis. And the noose is tightening: the draft three-year decree for 2026–2029, currently open for public consultation until 30 July 2026, plans to extend this classification to 91 departments — three more than at present!
“Trapping and shooting foxes at night, in a garden, simply because they dig burrows: this is where the logic of treating these animals as pests leads. We ask the judge to reiterate that wildlife is not a nuisance but an asset.” — Muriel Arnal, President of One Voice.
If a burrow in a garden is enough to condemn foxes to death, then no wild animal is safe anywhere. One Voice will not allow this precedent to be set and will be in court on 23 July to block it.
Court hearing on the foxes: Press release
One Voice goes to court to suspend the prefectural order authorising the killing of foxes on a private property in the Hauts-de-Seine